I'm about halfway through, and I find I'm having very mixed feelings about this book. The sections on the various diplomats, politicians and intrigue seem very good to me. When the war itself is chroncled, the author seems to lose her way. Part of the problem is just the methodology, a small number of Britishers are selected as sources, and their viewpoints are used to describe the progress of the war. This results in a kind of schizophrenic unfocused tale, where the redeployment of the 9th NY from Newport News to Suffolk gets many more paragraphs than Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Perryville and Stones River combined.
Worse, casualties and battle deaths are conflated by the author. This first occurs on Roanoke Island:
“Vizetelly watched as they hurled themselves up the slope of the battery. The men behaved, he continued, “in the most brilliant manner, dashing through the swamp and over the stumps of the pine-clearing, and into the battery, which the Confederates were hastily leaving.” When they reached the top, they discovered that the rebels had fled. The 9th took up the chase for four miles and finally cornered the defenders at the northern tip of the island, in their own camp. Herbert was delighted to hear that a journalist from the Illustrated London News was with them, and he asked his mother to look out for his reports. A total of 264 Union solders and 143 Confederates had been killed in the attack; later, he would consider such casualty numbers remarkably small, but for now he thought he had survived a great battle. "
Now I was willing to let that go, casualties were small enough here and in describing subsequent battles casualties were accurately portrayed.
But then in regards to Chickasaw Bayou:
"Sherman was pacing up and down at his headquarters when Morgan went to see him about collecting the wounded from the field. Unable to accept the extent of his failure, Sherman at first refused a flag of truce, condemning many of the wounded to death and the rest to capture. His initiation into independent command had cost the lives of 1,800 men, half of them from De Courcy’s 3rd Brigade."
This mistake is then compounded in the analysis
"Five days later, on January 3, De Courcy and his shattered regiments slunk into camp at Milliken’s Bend. The army was divided between those who believed Morgan and De Courcy, who hotly asserted that they did move forward (and had the casualties to prove it), and those who accepted the account of Brigadier General John Thayer, who claimed that he had passed them with his soldiers while they cowered in the first rifle pits. The dispute would never be resolved; years later, Private Owen Hopkins of the 42nd Ohio Infantry wrote that De Courcy’s brigade had followed behind his own, “but the boys pressed forward so vigorously in the daring onset that it was difficult to tell who was in the advance.” "
Surely 1800 dead (that's more than Fredricksburg by a wide margin)would be a far different "dispute" than the truer figure of 200 killed in this battle.
My opinion is that while the book gives a far better look at the diplomatic aspects re: Britain--USA-CSA, the sections of the book regarding the actual war in the field have rather the opposite effect.
Of course this is priliminary, I still need to finish. The conflation of casualties with killed
happens way too often, I'm a bit shocked to find it here in book of thus stature, with such overwhelmingly positive reviews. Perhaps the relative obscurity of the two battles above, as well as their relatively small casualties (in comparison to the major battles) is the reason this seems to have slipped by.